Inspiration

As students, we've been in classes, especially large ones, where the professors have had a hard time gauging student's comfortability and managing the entire lecture. We figured a tool that allows professors to gauge where a class is in realtime would solve this problem.

What it does

LectureHall allows students to post in realtime how their understanding of the subject currently being taught is. These results are aggregated from all students enrolled and are shown to the professor. In addition, LectureHall manages the lecture by allowing the professor to push questions to all students, allowing students to ask questions to the professor and allowing students to check into the class for attendance. Finally, all of this student data is displayed beautifully in a graph-based web interface for the professor to see.

How we built it

LectureHall was built for iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and the web with the Ionic 2 framework. Our database is a Firebase realtime database which gives it the power to scale to every lecture hall in the world. We built this platform over 36 hours at the UCI Hackathon mainly developing in Javascript.

Challenges we ran into

The network at the Hackathon made testing realtime integration and data synching very difficult since the bandwidth required wasn't there. The Ionic 2 framework is a fairly new version of the Ionic framework. To challenge ourselves and learn the newly updated framework, we decided to develop using Ionic 2 rather than Ionic 1.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are most proud of our realtime data visualizations. On our platform, someone across the world can wirelessly adjust a value with our app, and our data visuals, line graphs, bar charts, and more adjust while values are being updated in realtime, instantly. We're incredibly proud of how fast and fluent our visualizations show what is happening in realtime.

What we learned

Typescript, a variant on Javascript.
How to work in Native Javascript.
Charts.js, a JS library for charts.
The Ionic 2 framework for multiplatform apps.
Realtime data synching through the Firebase database.

What's next for LectureHall

One of our group members, Tim Johnson, is a TA and we plan to continue beta-testing this program in his discussion sessions with over 100 students for CS 162 at UCI. We hope to bring LectureHall to a point where it can be demonstrated to UCI faculty and administration for adoption into UCI classrooms. If all goes well, we plan to develop, market, and eventually sell our platform to campuses around the world and establish LectureHall.